This was a critical commentary on the Gospels written by a second-century Gnostic teacher named Basilides. None of his writings have survived. What is known comes from later Christian writers who quoted or described them.
Basilides taught in Alexandria during the rule of Roman Emperor Hadrian. Hadrian ruled from AD 117 to 138. His teacher, Glaucias, claimed to have been an interpreter for the apostle Peter. Basilides pretended his Gnostic ideas had come from Peter's views on God and Christ. He described God in a seemingly contrary (paradoxical) way as a Being without existence who created three Sonships. Through a series of spiritual "ascents" and "enlightenments," the gospel of the supreme God, the "Gospel of Light," eventually descended upon Jesus.
Origen declared that “Basilides dared to write a gospel According to Basilides.” Clement of Alexandria and the writer of the fourth-century fragment, Acta Archelai, thought Origen referred to an apocryphal gospel. They based their understanding of its content on the writings of Irenaeus, who had described Basilides’s teaching.
Today, most scholars agree with Hippolytus, another early church writer, who said that this was not a new gospel but rather a commentary on the existing Gospels. The unusual rituals and relaxed moral behavior later reported among Basilides’s followers probably did not come from him directly. His son Isidore led the Basilidian group in Egypt, and it continued there until the end of the second century.
See also Apocrypha.